A bit of a rant/whine, plus: How long are characters kept after account cancellation?

[rakeesh]

Can anyone authoratively answer this? My account renewal date is tomorrow, and I don't think I'm going to renew at this time.

I'm not going to say the game is too hard or that I'm upset that some unbalanced skill has been taken away from me, because I'm not. I'm just finding the game flaky (and I don't mean stability wise) and simply not fun anymore - and fun is why people play games. The community - which others have said, is exactly what makes up an MMO - is badly diminished, the people I enjoyed playing with have quit. Getting a group together was always difficult, and it was worse tonight.

For example, at one point I was forced to team with someone who was so far below me in level, the mobs which provided more than a pittance of XP for me were taking him down if I so much as blinked. I got into another group, a mere four of us, and as we fought mobs that gave us less than 2k XP, my armour was falling off me in tatters. I have to worry about decay now, because I need high-level mage gloves, and nobody seems to be making them, because high-level mats are hard to get, and mage glove crafters are hard to find, because crafting XP for them seems to be broken.

So, even though grouping is effectively a forced thing, the community is so small, and shrinking, that I find it next to impossible to find the right group for me.

But, to a certain extent, Nevrax has offended me on a bit of a professional level. I am a software developer. I've never written anything so large as Ryzom, but I have put together large-scale systems that affect tens of thousand of people. I know what it's like to feel like you're damned if you do and damned if you don't.

People have been alternatively attacking and defending the developers on these forums, but really none of that is appropriate, because the people responsible for all of this are the project managers. The developers come up with ideas and implement them. The project managers are the ones telling them to drive on or stop and think about it some more. And these are the guys messing up.

I always had a bit of a problem with the way some of the patches beforehand were put in place. They were always a bit of a surprise, you didn't know they were coming until the serverwide shutdown notice went out. Nevrax doesn't have a defined maintenance window, nor advance notice of outages. That grates me a little bit, but they're a new company, just launching, so I just ignored it.

But that mindset was evident with their testing of patch1; they waited until the last minute to get it put onto the test server, so the enraged outcries from those who had early access didn't have time to sink in. They blindly kept to their own schedule, even though it should have been obvious from reading the forums that the patch was going to go over like a lead balloon. That's the kind of thing testing is supposed to find... not just that the server doesn't crash right away.

And this isn't bad development... it's bad management.

It's become very obvious to me that the Nevrax developers have a hard time with "small" changes to gameplay. They don't tweak... they wildly swing the knob back and forth until they land on something people can live with, and in the process aggravate *everybody*.

This was obvious even back in the first open beta, when they were trying to deal with the overpowered mages, like phoenix, a level 250 mage within four weeks who could solo sixteen great kirostas simultaneously. The "fixes" they came up with were more and more contrived and aggravating until they finally had to shut down open beta and admit they needed more time to think about it. I actually admired them for that decision... and it was worth it, the level of improvement from OB1 to OB2 was spectacular.

Obviously they need to have revenue, they can't beta forever. But they should have at least took a lesson away from that, namely how badly they tend to make decisions when they're rushed.

The game has been launched, people were advancing a bit too fast, yes; but they should have tried to see what they could do with a bunch of small changes, like slightly increasing mob damage, keep mob HPs the way they were, lower mob spawn rates (or even stop mobs spawning at all when a player is camping the spawn...). The worst that would happen with small changes is that the players are advancing a little bit less too-fast than they were before. Instead, they slammed the brakes on hard, and they seem to have derailed the train as a result.

These are all calls a project manager should have made.

So I can't say I'm going to bother renewing. I have bills to pay as well, and a number of other games that I've been ignoring in favour of Ryzom, and I know I'm going to enjoy playing them.

When I mention this in game, some people seem to almost attack me for making this decision. That I should just stick with it, it'll be better, or perhaps that I'm just a wimp who can't handle a real challenge, like I'm taking my ball and going home. But I have to wonder at what point I go from being faithful to foolish.

How long should I really be expected to wait? I've seen a LOT of people recommend that nobody joins an MMO within the first six months. If I'd held off for those six months, would I be less of a whiner/exploiter/wimp/turncoat?

I wanted to enjoy Ryzom, and I still do. I believed in it enough to preorder, to suffer through the horrible preorder shipping disaster, to give up the preorder gifts and to pay nearly double for the game because Nevrax's own distributor had less interest in the game than I did. But I also know that software development, testing, and management is what I do all day at work, and I come home to get away from that, not to pay for the priviledge of watching someone else struggle through it.

So, the question I mentioned in the title: How long will my characters stick around? I well and truly hope to come back, and if my characters are still around, that improves the chances. If I can simply step away for a little while, when I come back I think things would be that much better, just like that gap between the two open betas. At least, then, the bugs will be new.

[spaero]

You are a most seasoned and learned player with a distinct insight into the software industry.
Your overview of the debaucle and assessment of the game from idea all the way to deployment suggests that not just the fed up and frustrated players are leaving, but the very personalities that make a bedrock of maturity in the playerbase see no reason to remain during what appears to be nothing short of a subscriptioned Beta.
Good luck to you, friend. I may just cross paths with you since we now are travelling the road leading to the next "town".

[borguk]

Very interesting read and nice insight.